The Last Days Of The Crazy People's Supermarket

After the astounding critical acclaim the band received following Needs More Wanger, the artists got a bit cocky and decided to venture into strange territory, with more sound collages than the previous album and several very edgy, "out there" tracks, intermixed with blues and folk tracks that, normally, would seem mainstream, but which seemed bizarre in their context. This project eventually coalesced into The Last Days Of The Crazy People's Supermarket. New talent also surfaced during this phase, with guitarists Manfire, Charlie, and M Otis Beard joining the band.

The album opens with the enormous group effort "The Sun! She Explode!", with vocals by the entire eastern seaboard. This moved into the rousing a capella folk song "The Ballad of the Eire Canal" and its NES-style reprise, then into the first of the sound collages, "Green Meat Sandwich". Also featured on the album were three versions of the tribute to the time-travel spammer, "Rewind", the rantish "Peroxide Piranha" and "Fuck the Bees", the bitter melancholy of "Planting Geraniums" and "Not Bitter Blues", the Puckettesque "Cal-Dal", a techno foray called "Eighth Rank", a synthpolka called "Not a Tuba Player", the elaborate avante garde experiments "She's a Geek Freak" and "Captain Marvel's Lament", and the simple guitar pieces "Hole in My Black Levis" and "Editors at War".

The band also released a promotional single with radio edits of two songs with swears in them: Swat the Bees / Peroxide Piranha (clean version). A cover of The Final Frontier was cut at the last moment because of legal complications, although the band did get to perform the song live on Walter Koenig's hep talk show, Koenig After Hours.

The title of the album came from the subject of this post from James 'Kibo' Parry.

The Sun! She Explode!

She sits and sighs and pets her dog
It's cold outside, she wipes the fog
From the frozen window. Snow is fall-ing
Oh! What a dreary day
If only she could go outside and play... [vocal fades into sounds of laughing children]
Her daydreams all turn summerish
She sits and sighs and makes a wish
That flies so high the eye can hardly foll-ow
Oh! Bring us a sunny day
Ninety-three million miles, so far away...

(Fast and hard bit):

THE SUN! SHE EXPLODE!
THE SUN! SHE EXPLODE!
THE SUN! SHE EXPLODE!
THE SUN! SHE EXPLODE!

(Insane panicked jam)

Burning buildings burning streets
Burning faces burning feets
Burning ears and burning hair
Burning water burning air
THE SUN! SHE EXPLODE!
THE SUN! SHE EXPLODE!
THE SUN! SHE EXPLODE!
THE SUN! SHE EXPLODE!

REPRISE/CODA:

A dog is man's best friend tonight
Inside a dog there is no light
So wipe away that boiling tear
We'll all be safe and cool in here my dear

Ballad of the Eire Canal

Green Meat Sandwich

Terri Willis (robot Terri, not meat Terri) wrote the following lyrics, which Talysman later recorded, much to everyone's surprise. although the lyrics could have worked as a punk or metal tune, the final product turned out to be a sound collage-style composition, with sound sample's of Talysman's voice under various distortions.

Green meat! Sandwich! Lunchtime! Deathwish! Toxic! Garnish!

Eat It Eat It Eat It Eat It Eat It Eat It Eat It Eat It Eat It Eat It Eat It Eat It Eat It Eat It Eat It Eat It Vending machine carousel RENEW!

Rewind

Peroxide Piranha

Fuck The Bees

In April of 2003, a few people complained that, for a band that was supposed to be an International USENET Punk Band, Interrobang Cartel didn't seem to have a lot of punk songs written or recorded. Fuck The Bees was jwgh's attempt to fill that gap.

The lyrics went unrecorded for many months. Then one day jwgh was exposed to the Brooklyn Funk Essentials song 'I Got Cash' and he realized that the lyrics could be taken in a different, non-punk, direction.

The resulting recording was made in January and was assembled using Apple's Garage Band product. (jwgh speculates that it might have been one of the first thousand songs recorded in Garage Band, but there is no evidence for this one way or the other.) A highlight of the recording might be the heavily processed whistling solo in the middle, which was intended to stand in for the theremin solo called for in the original written lyrics.

After jwgh recorded Fuck The Bees he then recorded a radio-safe version, Swat The Bees.

Lyrics

I get these headaches!
After these gigs!
They make me angry!
You fucking pigs!
FUCK THE BEES!
FUCK THE BEES!
FUCK THE BEES!
Stupid sinuses!
Why can't you go away!
Worthless Ibuprofin!
Why can't I get laid!? [<- NOTE USE OF INTERROBANG]
FUCK THE BEES!
FUCK THE BEES!
FUCK THE BEES!
I guess I could stop playing loud music!
But that's just what they're expecting!
Or maybe it's the pengins
Hanging from my nose ring!
FUCK THE BEES!
FUCK THE BEES!
FUCK THE BEES!

[THEREMIN SOLO, FOLLOWED BY A SCREAMING ROW BETWEEN THE GUITAR PLAYER AND THE SINGER]

Maybe I could think of better words!
If my head wasn't pounding so much!
It's really hurting a lot!
I can't even think of a fucking rhyme!
FUCK THE BEES!
FUCK THE BEES!
FUCK THE BEES!

[A FISTFIGHT BREAKS OUT; THE SONG ENDS AMIDST CHAOS]

Planting Geraniums

I have no comment on "[[Pigskin Loofah]]", because I am still horrified that people used their mighty musical talents on lyrics so spectacularly lame. They could have been doing something useful, like playing solitaire, or planting geraniums, instead.

Doctroid liked that last sentence and responded with lyrics for a song called "Planting Geraniums". Stacia responded

Not Bitter Blues

This was Charlie's initial solo contribution to the Interrobang Cartel project. The idea of Not Bitter seemed the perfect theme for a Bluesy type of song. In the beginning there was an idea of lyrics but they never developed, so it has remained an instrumental.

I Wanna Get Your Cal Dal

Eighth Rank

"Eighth Rank" is a techno composition with sound samples created by Tagutcow, who comments:

The set of instructions that came with a chess set I had started with the words "Chess symbolizes warefare." This, I thought, begged to be said in a huge, basso, bombastic voice. Vocal help courtesy of my sister.

Shortly thereafter he sent the lyrics to his old friend Major Zed who was so impressed by them he immediately wanted to do a complete rewrite. Doctroid collaborated in this, and then Major Zed made a recording.

Most of the vocals are synthesized, though Doctroid's and Major Zed's voices, heavily processed, are used in the intro/outro and bridge, respectively.

(8.) Left coset, right coset, normal subgroup, commutator - left cosets are aG, right cosets are Ga, a subroup G is normal if aG=Ga, a commutator is an element of the form (a)(b)(a^-1)(b^-1). This is all jargon from mathematical group theory (abstract algebra) which is important in quantum physics, God only knows why.

(10.) Knot invariants - quantities defined on knots that are the same for equivalent forms of the knot. For example, crossing number is the minimum number of crossings in a diagram of the knot. Boy scouts could be physicists.

(11.) Cauchy sequence - a mapping from counting numbers to a metric space where for any epsilon>0 there is an N such that... oh, never mind.

(12.) Butterfly catastrophe - one of the basic surfaces in Rene Thom's classification theorem (catastrophe theory). Not related to the "butterfly effect" (a butterfly flaps its wings and causes a hurricane). Not really, anyway.

(13.) Grassman bundle surgery - the Grassman manifold is the set of linear subspaces of a vector space. A bundle is locally a product of a vector space and a manifold. Surgery is the topological operation of defining the global structure of connectivity of a bundle. Think Moebius strip. Glad you asked?

(15.) Neutrino - chargeless, massless subatomic particle traveling at the speed of light. No, wait, it has a little bit of mass and it goes almost at the speed of light. But it has no charge. They think. Better check back next month.

Captain Marvel's Lament

jwgh wrote the following after Kibo described a Cat Stevens song he had just heard. Not R later set it to music.

I used to cry because I have no gloves
Then I met a man who had no brane
And it makes me think about my luck
HOW HARD IT IS FOR ME TO EXPLAIN!
And if I ever lose my hands
You'll see me jumping around
Yelling, "MY HANDS! MY HANDS! MY HANDS!
OW! JEEZ! WHERE ARE MY HANDS?"
Because I'm lucky just to have my hands.
You see?
I'm lucky just to have my hands.
And if I ever lose my legs
You'll see my rolling around
Yelling, "MY LEGS! MY LEGS! MY LEGS!
WHAT'S NEXT, MY FREAKIN' NOSE?"
Because I'm lucky just to have my legs.
You see?
I'm lucky just to have my legs.
And if I ever lose my ears
You'll see me walking around
With a quizzical look on my face
Saying, "EH? HUH? WHAT'D YOU SAY?
I'M SORRY, I HAVE NO EARS! SPEAK UP!"
Because I'm lucky just to have my ears.
You see?
I'm lucky just to have my ears.
And if I ever lose my tongue
You'll see me running around
Humming, "Hmm! Hmm! HMMmMMM HMmMM!
HMM HMM HM HMM HMM!"
Hmm hmm hmm HMMMmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmmm.
Hmmm hmm?
Hmm HMMmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm.

Alternate Verse jwgh further notes: Also, the following third verse was originally rejected for having a bit too much of the obvious bag about it, but it may have a certain something.

And if I ever lose my privates
You'll see me running around
Screaming, "GAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAH!"
Because I'm lucky just to have my privates.
You have NO idea.
I'm lucky just to have my privates.

Of course, that would probably lose us some radio play. BOURGEOIS PIGS! I SPIT ON YOUR MIDDLE-CLASS MORALITY! I MAKE WEE-WEE JOKES AT YOUR WEDDING CEREMONIES, SPAWN OF ACCOUNTANTS!

The night was dark and storms were near,
And thunder shook the floor.
The turbid air was filled with fear,
And editors at war.
With one fell macro, a paragraph filled
And BBedit roared;
And in gnus a poster was killed
In a single keychord.
Throughout the night, the titans clashed
And only dawn would see
If BBEdit crashed, by emacs bashed
Or who would the victor be.